Salesforce http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam Strong with the Force NPower is. A powerful ally to customers it will be. hourly 2 2008-10-21T00:13:01Z Apex & Visualforce http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/apex-visualforce No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-11T18:39:09Z Folder Apps & Add-ons http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/apps-add-ons Documentation and links for Appexchange apps, such as Vertical Response, and other add-on code or packages we use or offer our customers No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-11T18:43:03Z Folder Methodology http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/methodology Information and links about our Salesforce program and services, scoping, pricing, options, methodology No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-16T23:25:00Z Folder SControls & Web-to-Lead http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/scontrols-web-to-lead No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-11T18:40:40Z Folder Tools http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/tools Information and links about tools for Salesforce development, such as Eclipse, Ant, Data Loader, Prism, FireBug, and DemandTools No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-11T18:55:44Z Folder Force.com Developer Community http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/force.com-developer-community Documentation and discussions about Salesforce development No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-12T00:19:54Z Link NPSF Google Group http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/npsf-google-group The community space of nonprofit Salesforce implementors No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-07-12T00:23:54Z Link Dreamforce 2007 Trip Report http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/dreamforce-2007-trip-report great conference, man From: Evan Callahan <IMCEAEX-_O=NPOWER_OU=NPOWER_CN=RECIPIENTS_CN=EVANC@npowerseattle.lan>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:05:15 -0700
To: __Seattle Team <seattleteam@npowerseattle.org>
Cc: "Dave Shaw (Personal Account)" <dshaw@h4consulting.com>, Richard Saunders <richard@gaiaict.com>
Subject: dreamforce trip report

Hi Team,
 
I attended Dreamforce, the Salesforce.com conference, in San Francisco this week.  In attendance for the NPower Network were:
 
-        Simon, Lisa, Sonia, Anand, and Marc from NY
-        Pierre, formerly with AZ, now subcontractor for NY
-        The newest NY NPowerite, Sonny Cloward – an experienced Salesforcer who has worked with Swift River and others
-        Mike from Indiana
-        Dean from PA
-        Me from Seattle
 
We had a booth in the conference Expo, and we talked to many visitors and logged them as leads into a Salesforce instance.  Most visitors were nonprofits who've already selected Salesforce and were looking for advice or help.  I met one person from Seattle whose organization is interested in help from us (Northwest Interpretive Association).
 
The big announcements at the conference were:
-        force.com: The Apex platform and API is now called "force.com" – the idea being that you can build anything, not just sales-oriented applications. ("Apex" is still the server-side language.)  For-profit organizations can subscribe to force.com for a bit less than Salesforce.com if they don't need CRM.  We already get force.com for free, so not much of an announcement – ripe for Star Wars jokes, however.
-        VisualForce: The Flexible form designer for Salesforce, which will allow you to:
·        Design your own interface using any components or fields.  Use your own stylesheet, or automatically inherit the Salesforce one. 
·        Design forms that work with more than one object. 
·        In combination with Apex code, you'll be able to do really flexible apps, such as a custom wizard for complex operations or a single form that creates multiple data objects.  This will make custom interface design a LOT easier. 
·        Forms work on non-PC devices, like tablets and iPhones. 
·        I believe this is all available next summer, limited release earlier.
-        Salesforce Content:  Supercool document and knowledge management.  Not clear whether nonprofits will get this free – probably yes, although storage will presumably cost something.
-        Appy Award:  A social-impact measurement application created by Exponent Partners (Rem Hoffman) for FSA of SF (www.fsasf.org <http://www.fsasf.org/> ) won the nonprofit "Appy" award.  (I sure would love to win that award next year! Perhaps our Provail implementation?)
-        Apex code (server-side triggers) is only available in Unlimited Edition, which nonprofits don't have.  However, we received a promise that free nonprofit access to Apex is forthcoming.  Don't know when, maybe January.  GREAT news, although a bummer that Apex was the *BIG* announcement at Dreamforce *last* year and we still don't have it.  Apex will mean huge improvements for our nonprofit template – and hopefully the ability to get back in sync with the nonprofit template that the foundation supplies, because One/NW and others (me) will probably redesign the template for the foundation.
 
My other takeaways:
-        More nonprofits are looking at Salesforce than ever.  However, many are still skeptical and don't understand what CRM is all about or how to do it right.  We have a big opportunity to help here.
-        I met with the VP for Public Sector at Salesforce, Kaveh Vessali.  The company doesn't have a big footprint in government, and they'd like to.  He was encouraging us all to consider ways we can get public money to pay for our work, because government has deep pockets.  At first, I said, "But we only serve nonprofits."  Then I realized that we actually have two big clients who are government – City of Seattle (OED) and King County (4Culture).  We should talk about this – more I think about it, the more I like the idea of partnering with local government to build cool things that benefit our nonprofit space.  I wonder if we couldn't use our contacts on these projects to network and find similar opportunities.
-        In January, Salesforce will release the "Metatdata API" which will allow us to create objects and fields using code.  We saw a SWEET tool that lets you create a Salesforce instance from a Google spreadsheet containing field names and types.  Big time saver.  Other possibilities include creating a custom interface to help users add their own fields – might want to do this for the 4Culture grant application app, for example.
-        I looked at a bunch of great stuff that is available on the Appexchange:
·        Conga is mail merge and labels for Salesforce.  It is VERY nice – if anyone needs to print letters, create PDFs, merge any sort of spreadsheet or document, this is what we should use.  Costs money, but discounted for nonprofits.
·        Vertical Response is releasing a much improved UI for Salesforce.  No new features, but a lot easier to use.  Not sure when it comes out.
·        The DemandTools people are working on a neat tool that will alert you if you create a duplicate contact or account.  They donate to nonprofits, so we'll probably get it.
·        Someone needs to install ClickTools and check it out.  Powerful survey engine for Salesforce.  I spoke with the developer, he's going to set us up a free account.  I think we should do our own surveys and evaluations on this.
-        I'm talking to Steve Anderson about building a Paypal donation lead creator.  Every time you get a Paypal donation, it automatically shows up in Salesforce.  I think One/NW might do this, or we will.
 
There is a lot of momentum throughout the NPower Network for collaboration and for building a nationwide CRM practice.  The NY team intends to lobby Barbara and the Executive Committee hard for support – they have ambitious plans, including standardizing methodology, sharing resources, collaborating on projects, publishing applications on the Appexchange. We had a network meeting where we discussed ways to move this forward, such as creating screenscasts to show off some of our best work.  What's more, the Network wants to host a 2-day meeting of all NPower Salesforcers this spring.  They are thinking Philly, or DC, or Indiana.  The network will pay travel costs for all attendees.  Crazy.
 
Although it is tough to justify the time when we are so busy, I believe in the long run this collaboration effort will be the right thing for NPower Seattle and our customers.  I have a few action items in the short run, such as creating an email template that we're going to send out to everyone who visited our booth.
 
Let me know if you have any questions about any of this. 
 
 
Best,
-Evan

]]> No publisher Evan Callahan 2008-08-18T20:02:58Z Page Dreamforce 2008 Report http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/dreamforce-2008-report Evan Callahan's write up of Dreamforce 2008.

Big Announcements

----------------------

Salesforce continues to grow and invest in their service offering.  At Dreamforce, they announced a number of new capabilities that would be rolled into the donation license program for nonprofits in 2009:

 

1)    Salesforce Sites: a new capability of Force.com (the Salesforce development platform) that will allow customers to build and run public-facing websites in salesforce.com's cloud. Sites was certainly THE big deal for me at Dreamforce 2008, and I think it could be a huge tool for NPower moving forward.  While I am somewhat skeptical about our customers running their entire websites on Sites, it will enable us to create several “killer apps” that integrate with Salesforce data and appear on public-facing websites.  You build Sites pages using Visualforce, which is a markup language a lot like the Zope Page Templates we use in Plone (except it connects directly to your database).

 

Here are a few applications that we need desperately and will be a good fit for Sites:

 

·         Online event listing and RSVP – Invite people to your events by email, they click on a link to a Sites page and tell you how many people are coming and so forth, workflow sends them reminders – Steve Andersen and I made big progress on this one during the “Monday Night Hack-a-thon”

·         Newsletter subscription management

·         “Update your own profile” pages

·         Customer survey pages (without using a third-party vendor such as click tools)

·         Class attendance management

·         Payment processing – I believe we could use Sites and Apex to deliver a killer online donation service

·         Online Grant Applications!!!

 

The pricing includes Sites in the nonprofit donation, so as soon as this is generally available (Spring? Summer?) I plan to be ready to offer all these tools to our customers.  As you know, we’ve spent a lot of time and effort to create web integrations like this; now we can leverage tools we already know to provide access to the core database.  These tools will be very easy to create and customize, not to mention SELL on the appexchange.  Can you tell I am excited?

 

2)    Amazon & Force.com: By using Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises, ISVs and developers can build applications and run them entirely in the cloud, this technology leverages both the database, logic and user interface features of Force.com and the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services. I looked at the sample code for Amazon S3 integration today.  It is great – we will have no trouble creating pages that push large files into cheap S3 storage – and since nonprofits have found that Salesforce document storage is too expensive, this may be something we want to offer.

 

3)    Salesforce.com and Facebook Integration: Facebook the world's largest online social community has introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks.  I love the idea of getting into this – but it sounds hard!

 

4)    Without giving away too many details, I did a bit of quiet publicity for our upcoming easy-to-install template (aka “the DOT”). I learned that One/NW will most likely do a DOT like ours, too. 

 

5)    I pitched our new Brown Paper Tickets integration, available on the Salesforce AppExchange at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000005m9VjAAI.  I expect we will get a few early adopters out of it, and when we do, I hope to circle back to Brown Paper Tickets and see about that long-awaited “Sponsorship.”

 

6)    Our NPower NY pals were delighted to discover that the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) a New York based Human Services organization and an NPower customer won the 2008 Nonprofit Salesforce Appy Award for excellence and innovative use of technology to deliver its mission. It is a big honor.

 

Our Friends

--------------

We encouraged our customers to attend Dreamforce, and several of them did!  We were excited to see folks from Unitus, Social Venture Partners, Multifaith Works, and Provail.  I expect their reviews of the conference will be greatly mixed, but I hope they all found some value in the presentations. 

 

Vinod from Unitus was a speaker – I had recommended him to the Salesforce team for this.  Vinod spoke about their extensive use of tools on the AppExchange, including Vertical Response, ActevaRSVP, a recruiting app called JobScience, and (drum roll please) Plone.  Vinod was incredibly gracious: he raved about the Unitus site and the work we did to integrate Salesforce data on the site.

 

One of the best things about Dreamforce for me is sharing with other developers and consultants.  I was able to connect with many other nonprofit-focused humans, including Steve Andersen, Joey Gray, and Dave Manelski from One/NW, Judi Sohn from Colorectal Cancer Coalition, Meghan Morrison from Swift River, Matt Kaufmann from MK Consulting, and of course Marc Baizman, Lisa Glass, and Sonny Cloward (former NPower NY).

 

The options for nonprofits using Salesforce continue to expand each year; at the same time, it is worth noting that the majority of nonprofits continue to be at a loss for how to get where they want to go.  There is a lot of excitement about Convio’s Common Ground donation implementation, precisely because it promises to help bridge the gap for organizations that don’t have good consulting help—although at a high subscription price.  I believe NPower should also move forward with plans to provide a better alternative to the “Nonprofit Edition” configuration and tools provided by the Foundation; in any case, we intend to do this for our Seattle customers.

 

Other Things I Saw

----------------------

A few folks on the Expo floor worth mentioning:

1)    Echo Sign (www.echosign.com):  Digital signatures for contracts.  One/NW uses and recommends this, and I hope we are going to look into it for NPower Seattle.  Nonprofit discount.

2)    CRM Orbit (www.crmorbit.com): I had not met these folks; they are an implementor with resources in India, and seemed interested in cooperation w/NPower.

3)    Jitterbit (www.jitterbit.com): This is server software that pumps data from one source to another.  Their tools and support for Salesforce are far better than last time I looked – if you need to integrate another system with Salesforce affordably, take a look at Jitterbit.  They gave me a cool rocket, too – the kids love it.

4)    Vertical Response: They really are good people. Spoke with the Director of Development -- he heard all my input and promised that they are working on it.

 

One company conspicuously absent at DF is Democracy In Action.  I heard from at least 5 people that they have tried and failed to configure the DIA integration with Salesforce.  I hope they will hear from us and try to work on it in the near future, because I think DIA’s online advocacy tools are otherwise strong and a very good value.

 

Salesforce at NPower Seattle

----------------------------------

A huge highlight of the show was my private demo of Steve Andersen’s own Salesforce account for One/NW, where he has built sophisticated pipeline management, time tracking, billing, contracts, surveys, and outcomes management for their consulting business.  Steve is going to share a lot of his code with me, and I expect we will see some dramatic improvements in the NPower Seattle Salesforce account in the coming year.  I hope to share more about this with many of you in the coming weeks.

 

 

I must close with my election night story.  The Salesforce Foundation hosted a delightful party at the top of an old hotel, with a big-screen TV near the bar.  They cranked President-elect Obama’s speech for the enrapt audience, and I was caught weeping in front of my Salesforce colleagues.  Afterwards, we spilled out into Union Square, which was packed with crowd of joyous revelers, and then continued to a club where we danced continuously until 2am.

 

If this wasn’t enough, don’t miss Patrick’s blog about Dreamforce at http://community.npowerseattle.org/patricks/uncategorized/what-i-learned-at-dreamforce-part-one/. Also, I hope some of you will pop your heads in for the first Seattle Nonprofit Salesforce User’s Group meeting, to be held at our office on Wed the 19th.

]]> No publisher Patrick Shaw 2008-12-17T21:30:39Z Page Tests, Individual Account, Lead Converstion http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/tests-individual-account-lead-converstion Snippets from an email from Steve Andersen regarding tests, deploying and ways to write your code to avoid challenges with the individual account. I've learned a bunch over the last 2 weeks and I wanted to pass it on.

If you have a setup with a Bucket account, like Individual, and you've written Apex code that uses a Bucket account, you may want to make some changes to how you test that code.

This all started as I was deploying code to a client of mine and during the deploy to production I got an email about an unhandled exception in a lead trigger. Turned out that while I was deploying code someone filled out a form on the website and a lead was created. That lead was auto-converted via a trigger we have, but was unable to complete because it couldn't get exclusive access to the Individual account.

Why couldn't it? Because during a deploy, all your tests run. And a whole lot of my tests expect and use the Individual account. So, when my lead conversion test was running, it was locking up the individual account for some seconds, and if production tried to edit that account, there was a conflict, causing the form submission to fail.

We figured this out with help from salesforce.com dev support. And I've spent quite a while changing all my tests so that when the tests run they don't rely on an Individual account, but use a testing individual account that is created in each test.

Do you have this problem? Here's an easy way to find out. In a sandbox get rid of your individual account by changing it's name or some other way to make it invisible to your code. Run all tests. Do they pass without the individual account? If they don't, your tests are relying on production data which can cause you problems. The greatest risk in my code is around lead conversion. Salesforce lead conversion will update the bucket account and we have to blank out some fields, so we have to update it in most cases. If you are testing against live data this is what will lock things up in your production environment.

If you have any questions about what this means to you, ask away, I'm happy to help out.

]]> No publisher Patrick Shaw 2008-12-18T22:51:40Z Page Cases In Salesforce http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/Cases.doc Research from 01-31-2007 about Cases. Might be Dated info. No publisher Patrick Shaw 2008-12-19T16:36:44Z File Unofficial NPO Pricing Guide for SF Licenses http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/unofficial-npo-pricing-guide-for-sf-licenses From the NPO Google Groups. No publisher Kevin Bromer 2008-12-19T19:27:50Z Link Getting Started with Images http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/getting_started_with_images_v1.pdf Using the IMAGE() function in a Salesforce formula to display images. Some very cool potential here. Green flags for Donors who have donated more than X dollars this year? Red flags for donations that are way past the close date? No publisher Mike Jones 2009-01-15T18:26:07Z File Lindsey Anderson Cloudforce 09 Foundation Presentation http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/Cloudforce%20Seattle%20Foundation%20Intro.ppt From Cloudforce 09 NPO User's Group in Seattle, Foundation representative Lindsay Anderson provided this introduction to the Foundation No publisher Kevin Bromer 2009-06-24T22:38:19Z File Steve Andersen Cloudforce 09 Foundation Presentation http://web.npowerseattle.org/devteam/database/salesforce-at-npower/Summer09Coudforce.ppt No publisher Kevin Bromer 2009-06-24T20:43:04Z File